


waiting at the water's edge

by copacet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Getting Together, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 20:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15979562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copacet/pseuds/copacet
Summary: Matt and his sister have always been close, but after she crosses the universe to find him, he comes to some overdue realizations.





	waiting at the water's edge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



Matt has always known that his sister is smart. Katie’s reading by the the time she turns three, and asking him to teach her what he’s learning in school from the first day of kindergarten when she realizes her own teachers aren’t going to tell her anything she doesn’t already know. Matt doesn’t mind; he knows how it feels to be bored in class, to crave new knowledge, and besides, it’s more fun to learn stuff together. He happily pulls a second chair up to his desk so they can read the same book side-by-side.

When they’re a few years older, they invent a new, Turing-complete programming language together, just to see if they can do it. Sitting crammed next to one another on a single chair in front of the computer every day after school, they take turns typing and bicker over syntax until their parents call them down for dinner.

Two weeks into the project, Matt’s dad takes him aside and says that it’s great that he’s spending time with his sister, but doesn’t Matt want to take a day or two off to play with kids his own age? Matt laughs and tells him not to worry. Katie—or Pidge, as he likes to call her; it’s a silly nickname, but her face lights up every time he uses it— _is_ his best friend. It would be nice to have others, but he doesn’t need them.

Matt’s a month into eighth grade when his parents realize that he’s already blown through his assigned geometry textbook, so his mom goes out and buys him a calculus book instead. He starts studying it each night once he’s finished his actual homework and gives the geometry textbook to Pidge, since her class is still learning long division, which, please. Matt had taught her how to do long division when she was six.

“My genius children,” their mom comments proudly. Matt and Pidge look at each other and grin.

* * *

Two weeks after Matt submits his application to the Galaxy Garrison, he’s watching a movie in the living room with his family, all crammed onto the couch. Matt’s got his dad on one side of him and his sister on the other. When he reaches across Pidge to grab the bowl of popcorn, leaning over her, their legs pressing together, she jumps up from the couch.

Matt blinks at her. “You okay, Pidge?”

“Can you not call me that?” she snaps. “I’m not a little kid anymore!” She stomps across the room and then up the stairs. A few seconds later, he hears the sound of her bedroom door slamming.

Matt looks at his parents. They look back at him, apparently as taken aback as he is.

“I’ll go talk to her,” says Dad.

Matt shakes his head, getting up from the couch. “No, I’ve got it.” He heads up the stairs after her, unsettled. Pidge—Katie—has always had a temper; Matt just can’t think of the last time it was aimed at _him_.

Somewhat tentatively, he knocks at her door. “Katie? Everything okay?”

She opens the door. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m just...dealing with some stuff. Didn’t mean to take it out on you.” She turns and walks back into her room, sitting down on her bed.

Matt follows her in. “Someone giving you a hard time at school?” he guesses.

“No, nothing too bad recently.” She shakes her head, still not looking at him. “It’s—it’s nothing.”

“Boy trouble? Girl trouble?” He’s mostly joking, but her cheeks redden, and a flush creeps up her neck. “Oh,” says Matt. Bullying would almost have been easier; he could have at least given her advice from personal experience. But romance? Matt’s not exactly experienced in this area either.

(There had been one time, when he was about as old as Katie is now, when he’d tried to ask out a girl in his class. She had been smart, and she’d never made fun of him for being a nerd, and though he cringes now to think of his thirteen-year-old self’s low standards, that had been enough for him to go up to her locker ask her to a school dance.

She hadn’t made fun of him when she’d turned him down either, though some of their other classmates, listening to him stammer out his invitation, had been laughing.

There are times when Matt wants to fall to his knees and thank the universe that he’s no longer in middle school.)

But maybe Pidge will be luckier than he was at that age. Surely some of her classmates must recognize how amazing she is, how brilliant and funny she can be.

“Do they like you too?” He’s not sure how he feels about that idea. Pidge can take care of herself, of course, and he definitely wants her to be happy, but—

“Uh,” she says. “I really, really, don’t think so. Y— _He_ just wouldn’t see me that way.”

“You’re amazing,” he tells her. “Any guy would be lucky to have you. If he doesn’t see that, it’s his loss.” To his horror, she blinks rapidly and turns her face away from him, but not before he sees the tears shining in her eyes. “Aww, Pidge, don’t cry over this guy. It’ll be okay.”

“It’s nothing,” she says again, voice choked, scrubbing her face with her palms. “Just a stupid crush.”

Matt frowns. Maybe there’s more going on here than he’d thought. “Has he been mean to you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just.” She shakes her head. “He’s not interested in me—it’d be inappropriate if he was, and there’s nothing wrong with _him_ —it’s just a stupid crush, all right?”

Suddenly, Matt gets it. He raises his hands. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Lots of people get crushes on their teachers, you know.” Like, for example, most of the boys and a few of the girls on his current physics teacher. At least he can be pretty certain Pidge isn’t the type to disrupt class with inappropriate pickup lines.

She sputters.

“It’s totally natural,” he continues, sitting down next to her on the bed and wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “There’s nothing wrong with you, I promise.”

For a moment she stays hunched in on herself, shoulders tense beneath his arm. Then she relaxes, curling towards him and looking up at him with fond eyes. “Thanks, Matt,” she says, smiling softly. “You’re the best, you know that?”

“I absolutely know that,” he responds, and they laugh in unison.

* * *

When he he goes on the Kerberos mission, everything changes. Captured by aliens (aliens!), escaping with the rebels to join the fight against the Galra, it’s all a long way from the quiet life of scientific investigation he’d always envisioned. And he could have stayed behind the scenes of the rebellion, helping the freedom fighters with their tech, but he doesn’t. As it turns out, Matt _likes_ fighting. He likes the adrenaline rush of a successful mission, the thrill of a narrow escape, more than he’d ever thought he could.

And then he meets his sister in what should have been an empty base, and Matt realizes that some things hadn’t changed at all.

It’s funny. He’d missed her desperately, of course. Missed having dinner with her and Mom and Dad, missed nerding out with someone just as enthusiastic about science as he was, missed laughing with her and playing with her and a thousand other things he’d thought he might never get to experience again. But somehow he hadn’t realized just how much he missed her until after they’d already been reunited, when they’d taken down the bounty hunter together. She’d understood his plan with just a few shouted words, had executed it perfectly without any further discussion that might have tipped the guy off.

The freedom fighters he’d been working with were great, and he’d made friends with many of them. But there was only one person who understood him so completely—who _he_ understood so completely—that they didn’t need to exchange words to communicate. He could think something, and know she was thinking the same thing. For all the time he’d spent thinking about Pidge, both when he’d been in Galra captivity and after his escape, he hadn’t realized how much he missed the rush of being so completely on the same wavelength as another person until he’d had the chance to feel it again.

Because for all that Matt has changed, Pidge has been growing, too, their paths separated but still running in parallel. She’s a fighter now too, a paladin, she’s—

She’s amazing. She’s always been amazing, of course, but now? _Wow_. She’s more confident, more centered. And the way she was fighting on that base, the power and agility in her movements? He’d been focused on his own half of the battle at the time, but the memory keeps replaying in his mind, the way she moved; she’s definitely not a little girl anymore—

Oh.

* * *

 After Pidge gives him a tour of the magic space castle she now apparently lives in (!!!), Matt follows her back her room and wonders if he’s about to make a truly massive mistake.

He’s _pretty_ certain he’s not misinterpreting her behavior, but if he is, talk about awkward.

“Here,” Pidge says, once they’re inside. “I should probably tidy a few things up.” She starts picking things off the floor and then tossing them back onto different areas of floor.

She’s not looking at him, and somehow that makes it easier. “It wasn’t a teacher,” he blurts out. “Was it?”

"What wasn’t a teacher?” She sounds distracted. Piles are starting to emerge out of the clutter she’s redistributing, and Matt is momentarily distracted trying to figure out what organizational system she’s using, since she doesn’t seem to be separating the clothes from the alien tech or anything obvious like that.

He almost asks, but—no, no putting this off. He has to be brave. Brave like his sister. “Uh, a while back, before I left for the Garrison. You told me you had a crush on someone—someone inappropriate.” He swallows. “I thought it was a teacher, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Across the room from him, Pidge goes very still and very pale, and Matt almost flees the room. Slowly, she straightens up, still facing away from him. “Yeah. You were wrong.”

He looks back at her. “There’s some stuff I wasn’t wrong about, though.”

“Oh?”

“You are amazing.” He crosses the room to stand in front of her. She stares resolutely at the wall. “And any guy _would_ be lucky to have you.” Reaching out, he takes both of her hands in his and pulls her gently around until they’re face to face.

She looks down at their entangled hands, then back up at him. “ _Any_ guy?”

He looks at her. His little sister. But his little sister, the soldier; his little sister, the paladin, the badass fighter who came halfway across the universe to find him. Not quite an adult, but no longer a child. “Any.”

She kisses him, and it turns out that they’re just as good at doing that together as they are at everything else.


End file.
